Thoughts on Between Past and Future

Science and culture: what’s happening?

Science has polarized Americans for years but now more than ever.

Even though effective COVID-19 vaccines have been widely available to healthy American adults for months, many refuse the protection and vow to never succumb to Bill Gates’s “microchip.” My current state, Missouri, ranks as a COVID hot-spot. Some Missourians have dressed in disguise and begged doctors to not publicly reveal they’ve been vaccinated against the virus.

Anti-vaxxers are not a new phenomenon. I do not like to make generalizations, so I will acknowledge that not every anti-vaxxer is necessarily anti-science. However, they are a good paradigm for the relationship between science and the general public.

Earlier this year I read a book called Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes. The author argues that scientists should earn trust much like plumbers or electricians, whom we pay to perform tasks we do not necessarily understand even if we wanted. Yet we still pay them to do their job. We trust them to do their job effectively; we “believe” in them, especially if a friend or online reviewer recommended an especially good plumber.

Oreskes identifies a couple reasons why the general public struggles to trust science, even though science envelopes our everyday lives via smartphones, toasters, and the like: the general population’s economic interests and science’s seeming lack of morals.

It’s been several months since I read her book, so I may be a bit rusty, but I did recently finish Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future. Arendt’s concluding essay, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” encouraged me to revisit the relationship between science and the general population.

Arendt raises several questions that make no sense to the scientist but rather concern the layman and the humanist: what is the nature of man and what should be his stature? What is the goal of science and why does man pursue knowledge? What is life and what distinguishes human from animal life?

The layman and the humanist supervise the scientist; they judge what the scientist does because it concerns all mankind. Any answers to these questions, however, are non-scientific, though not necessarily anti-scientific, because they are never true or false. The problem is that terms like “man,” “science,” and “knowledge” are pre-scientific – almost archaic at this point considering how rapidly science advances in the current era.

It is easy for non-scientists to claim that we all now live in a world where common sense and reality are no longer compatible. If this were true, then scientists would be among the powerful “few” who rule the “many” – those clouded by ignorance and anxiety. After all, scientists communicate in an almost different language at work. Society lacks quality science writers to bridge the gap.

But this is not true. Scientists still spend a large chunk of their lives in the same “common sense” world, speaking the same everyday language as laymen. Many climate change researchers drive cars and use plastic because they are convenient. Some evolutionary biologists are devout Christians. Their work does not disclose this information.

Here is where I feel Oreskes and Arendt converge: the “problem” with science is that its results are so objective that laymen feel humanity and science are incompatible. Oreskes acknowledges that scientists seldom use pronouns such as “I” or “we” in scientific writings, relying instead on the passive voice. This is nothing new; in fact, young science students are taught to present their work in this way. Sometimes we encounter sentences like “we did X,” but these pronouns are never introduced to present moral arguments.

That makes people uncomfortable. On the surface this not crazy given not too distant scientific history: men of the twentieth century split atoms without hesitation despite potential havoc. Today, we are told that computers perform operations which the human brain cannot comprehend, even though humans developed these machines. People like morals, even if others do not share their own, as they indicate “human” rather than “machine.”

Man now achieves things which cannot be expressed in everyday human language. Consider the COVID-19 vaccine’s mRNA-based technology. Search for “covid 19 mrna” to find a plethora of articles, many aimed toward the layman rather than the bioengineer, explaining how these vaccines work. Sounds good in theory, but when people divorce themselves from science entirely, refusing to even consider something “foreign,” these attempts are futile. Instead they seek comfort in defending their apparently threatened human rights in the wake of a “plandemic” because to do otherwise would surrender their own humanity, much like scientists have already done. Or so it seems.

Although I appreciate Arendt pointing out that many scientists are not so different from laymen as it seems, she, too, fears a world manufactured entirely by science: “All our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race . . . under these circumstances, speech and everyday language would indeed be no longer a meaningful utterance that transcends behavior even if it only expresses it, and it would be much better replaced by the extreme and the in itself meaningless formalism of mathematical signs.”

I don’t think these concerns are unfounded. Even as a PhD candidate in a STEM field, I fear a world where everything is optimized, “black-and-white,” or manufactured. The humanities enrich my free time. Writing posts like these scratches that itch for something more than science 24/7.

Now I turn to another essay from Between Past and Future called “The Crisis in Culture.”

A philistine judges everything in terms of material interests, which I liken to Marx’s term “use value.” This person finds little to no use in artistic and cultural objects or occupations. That is not to say that the philistine is uneducated or that art’s utility can or should not be exploited. We can listen to music from the twenties to better understand what life was like in that era. We can determine how well our favorite painting at the local museum fits into a specific artistic movement or historical period. There is nothing inherently wrong with these notions so long as “one remains aware that these usages, legitimate or not, do not constitute the proper intercourse with art.”

The problem is not necessarily that no one reads the classics anymore but rather that only an “ulterior motive of self-perfection” prompts the educated philistine to engage with art. Cultural objects like books, paintings, music, and building were made to outlast us. These objects lose immortality when seized as currency, to buy a higher self-esteem or social status. Arendt traces this behavior back to the European middle class’s battles with the aristocracy, as culture became the best weapon to advance socially.

I genuinely believe many people read Dostoyevsky because his novels are timeless – not because they want to show off to their peers. I like to think I am one of those people. But I do think we can find more than one “educated philistine” today. For example, visit your local bookstore, where you’re bound to find heaps of books on stoicism that dip into self-help territory. I do not want to critique stoicism or its followers; after all, we can pluck great lessons from its primary texts to apply to our own lives. However, I do wonder about Silicon Valley and Wall Street giants who tout stoicism as some cure-all, harvesting Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s maxims for use value. I highly recommend Ada Palmer’s take on this topic.

Funnily enough, mass society, or those who seek entertainment rather than culture, threatens culture less than philistinism. At first I was skeptical, but now Arendt’s perspective makes more sense. Book lovers can write off television shows and YouTube videos as “unworldly,” but why critique the entertainment industry for producing non-durable consumer goods, when a café also makes non-durable goods? They were never meant to withstand the test of time. Art can flourish alongside these things. In fact, we need both. I love this quotation:

“. . . as far as artistic productivity is concerned, it should not be more difficult to withstand the massive temptations of mass culture, or to keep from being thrown out of gear by the noise and humbug of mass society, than it was to avoid the more sophisticated temptations and the more insidious noises of the cultural snobs in refined society.”

It seems the arts and consumerism could live in harmony, balancing each other out. Unfortunately, the problem is that now mass society is consumers' society, which dedicates leisure time to more and more consumption and entertainment and less longing for self-improvement. A consumers' society does not know how to care for cultural objects.

I don’t think Arendt contradicts herself here but rather identifies two camps: those who exploit art for selfish gain, and those who want nothing to do with it. The former endangers culture itself, and the latter endangers the world more broadly. Neither is good.